A Spreadsheet for Breaking Down & Tracking Big Goals

Defining and achieving goals is hard. In this post, I’ll describe a tactic to quantify your goal, demonstrate a tool to track it, and review the positive impact that this tactic will have.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to get better at managing your time and effort. That sounds great, but it’s pretty vague. Let’s make it concrete.

1. Break Down Your Goal into Measurable Chunks

I’m not going to lie—this is the hard part. How does one take a qualitative “get better at X” and quantify it?

The first step is to break a large goal into smaller chunks. Image credit : Julie Sandeen

One tactic that can help is to break it into manageable pieces. In this example, a good small chunk is “I want to ask a team member for help at least once a week during Q3 2018.” Great. That’s small, obvious, and easy to track.

2. Start Tracking

I like to use a Google spreadsheet to track goals like this. Google Sheets are nice because they :